An Officer and a Spy

"I think we’ll start with my favourite book on this list, and that’s Robert Harris , An Officer and A Spy . It’s a retelling of the story of the Dreyfus Affair. It’s fiction, but it’s based on the actual history of the story, and it’s got facts, references to the real ambassadors, generals and diplomats who took part. It tells the story of the Dreyfus Affair from the viewpoint of Georges Picquart, who was the man who investigated it, who was at the time part of the French intelligence service. So the story follows him and his uncovering of the Dreyfus Affair and how people in high places in the French army and government had been actively working against Dreyfus, to protect the honour of the French army, even after the truth came out that he was in fact innocent. The Dreyfus Affair was a series of events from the 1890s to roughly 1906, where a Jewish officer in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of leaking military secrets, the designs of an artillery cannon, to the Germans. This was highly charged, due to the fact that only 20 years earlier, Germany had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the French in the Franco-Prussian War. (Well, Prussia had inflicted it). Alfred Dreyfus was blamed for this, even though he had had no opportunity of getting the information on the cannon. He was probably blamed due to being Jewish. Then Colonel Picquart, as happens in the book, investigated the case and found that a French major, Ferdinand Esterhazy, had in fact been the real culprit in the leaking of the designs. Picquart was constantly blocked from revealing this information and there were many trials and eventually Esterhazy was brought to court and Dreyfus was released after years on a solitary island with horrible conditions. He was convicted of treason in 1894, and declared innocent in about 1906, so the whole thing lasted 12 years."